The first refrigerator that I remember was kerosene powered. As a child it fascinated me that a device for making things cool (a fridge) could be powered by a burning flame that was extremely hot. No one could explain it to me...
Of course I am special. I know all the words to the nonsense rhyme “One fine day in the middle of the night”, I once made an Olympic torch out of cardboard and coloured streamers and I’m the only person sitting...
We meet every month for a meal at the Curmudgeon Hotel. We are all men of a certain age, silver haired, distinguished in our own eyes and pompously prejudiced. We take it in turns to sound off about our own selfish certainties...
I had just started my first job and some of my co-workers wanted to go away all together for the weekend. Cheryl had been a pony club member as a youngster and she urged us to go horse riding in the Grampians, a beautiful...
As a semi-responsible global citizen I aspire to become more energy efficient. So I googled “energy efficiency” and the first article to come up was “Energy Efficiency Is A Must For California Buildings Moving...
My first radio did not give birth to me or teach me to walk or give me food or love me as my beloved biological mother did. But my radio mother was unquestionably motherly and even grandmotherly. She was large and rounded and...
Our first house, in Brunswick in inner city Melbourne, had suffered at the hands of a succession of renovators. The main problem was that it had been concrete-ized, probably in the 1970s. The charming Victorian facade features...
Stress has been described as “hurry sickness”. We hurry, we get stressed, we hurry harder, we get more stressed. Finally all that hurry stress is converted into energy and our brains explode in a spectacular display...
Of course we could grow our own vegetables. We had seen celebrity gardeners on TV do it. It looked so quick and easy when the whole process was shown in fast motion. One minute the celebrity gardener was turning the first spade...
I simply wanted to know what sort of live music was happening at my local bistro. It had a sign out the front advertising “Friday Live Music”. We all know to look online for instant answers. I looked up the bistro...
